The advent of social networking and smart phones, and the corresponding proliferation of application software and web services, has resulted in users relinquishing rights to a significant amount of personal information. Most computing device users accept terms and conditions, permissions, privacy statements, or other privacy policies without reading them, and/or appreciating their provisions, in order to obtain applications. These policies are generally very long, complex, difficult to read, and non-negotiable. Unfortunately, by accepting such policies and using the associated applications, users often give up certain rights to their personal information and other content without realizing it. For example, location, address book content, message content and records, browsing history, and calendar content as well as videos, photos, written content, and expressed opinions on social networks are often obtained and used by application or service providers in a variety of ways that may be undesirable for the users and content owners.
In some cases, users may believe use of an application is governed by the policy of a provider of the application that is trusted, such as with respect to applications having millions of users that may be perceived as governed by the “crowd.” However, policies by trusted providers often state that their provisions do not apply to third party applications that interface with trusted provider's application, resulting in a false sense of security for a user and, potentially, undesirable dissemination of personal information and content through the third party applications. Moreover, many policies are changed over time by application providers, including trusted providers, who often do not notify users or obtain their consent for the updated provisions. Although many application providers allow users to set privacy settings, the allowable settings may still result in unwanted dissemination of information and most users interact with applications according to their default settings.
While many policies contain provisions that are reasonable, necessary for effective operation of the application, and generally acceptable by users, application users do not currently have any way to easily and intuitively understand the rights they may be agreeing to in order to use an application. Additionally, application users are currently unable to easily obtain information that can be used to distinguish between benign and malevolent applications with respect to users' privacy. Accordingly, personal information and content is increasingly obtained and used by application providers, often to the detriment of inadequately informed application users.